


Gravity

by tokillthatmockingbird



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, a fic centered around the song 'gravity' by sara bareilles, i'm not going to lie i was close to tears writing this, if you would like to cry while reading it, listen to the song at the same time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-20
Updated: 2014-02-20
Packaged: 2018-01-13 04:10:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1212199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tokillthatmockingbird/pseuds/tokillthatmockingbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He drags himself back to the car heavier and older. He is afraid to let go of her weight now, after carrying both of them for so long. So he clings and drives home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gravity

**Author's Note:**

> This is a John/Claudia ficlet, set after her death, based on the song "Gravity" by Sara Bareilles. Which is an absolutely beautiful song. This is honestly the saddest fic I have ever written. Let me know what you all think!

_Something always brings me back to you._

_It never takes too long._

_No matter what I say or do_

_I'll still feel you here 'til the moment I'm gone._

There’s an inexplicable draw to the cemetery for months after the funeral. It’s way past too late, and John points the car due north, following the _thump thump thump_ of his heart buried beneath the ground. Locked gates and trespassing laws flutter by him with no second thought because John doesn’t think there is any mortal institution that could bar him from her anymore.

In the dark and cold, he has no rational thoughts and no tether to reality. Either he reels in the memories of sterile hospital rooms or wipes his mind clear of anything at all. A numb shell crunches through gravel and leaves, and despite moist, chilly ground, he folds himself into the grass in front of a slab of shining black rock.

In the moonlight that speckles through ground through the trees, he can see letters of her name, patchwork pieces that couldn’t even combined contain all that she used to be. Claudia Stilinski. Loving mother and wife. It is not enough for her. There are no words that can capture her spirit, can encompass all that she ever was and never got to be.

He would wet himself with tears, press his forehead against the stone. “Why? Why? _Why_?” He’d repeat the words into the night with nothing but rushing wind and curious nightlife to answer his call.

He drags himself back to the car heavier and older. He is afraid to let go of her weight now, after carrying both of them for so long. So he clings and drives home.

 

_You hold me without touch._

_You keep me without chains._

_I never wanted anything so much_

_Than to drown in your love and not feel your rain._

   

When he goes to bed at night, it’s with a glass of water at her bedside and an alarm set for half past five o’clock so she can do her silly yoga routine before she makes breakfast. It takes him weeks to wash the sheets, to scour away the scent of her shampoo from the pillow. It is a month before he starts thumbing through her things. His sister drives in from Palo Alto to help.

John sits uselessly on the bed and just stares while her life was stowed away in labelled boxes. How was it that a woman so vibrant and loving and so very alive could now be categorized into “throw away” and “give to charity”. Betsy said there would be no “keep” pile. She knew by one look at John’s shadowed and broken face that he kept enough of her stored in his heart.

Stiles plucks through the boxes while his father restlessly dozes on the couch. He finds an old straw hat she wore in the garden, still smells the dirt that clung in the ridges. There’s a bracelet that he recognizes from the wedding picture on the mantlepiece. John watches, one eye cracked open, while his son systematically brings nearly every piece in the “throw away” box back up to his room.

John keeps only one thing and that’s her wedding ring. He was supposed to bury her with it. She asked to be buried with it. But parting from the reminder that a woman like her had once loved him so purely was like cleaving his heart from his chest. Betsy had held him when he sobbed, promised that Claudia would never hold it against him.

No, she would never hold anything against him again.

_Oh, you loved me 'cause I'm fragile_

_When I thought that I was strong._

_But you touch me for a little while_

_And all my fragile strength is gone._

Stiles goes to the emergency room with a broken arm and fat tears, and it takes his wailing to uproot John’s feet from outside the doors. He steps with trepidation into the familiar smell, taste, _horror_ of the hospital. His heart beats inhumanely fast, and he clenches his hand by his side, pretending he can feel the ghost of her wedding ring biting into his flesh again, the pinch of her fingernails in his skin. It is only with her strength that he can carry on.

With a clipboard and a promise to be seen soon, John scoots himself into a chair while Stiles stammers beside him. He wants to shift the boy into his lap, to hold him close, and kiss the cowlick in his dark nest of hair. But he knows the motions will feel fake to Stiles because John can’t carry half the warmth and love she had. He loves his son. He loves his son.

But Claudia took the easiness of love with her. He is lost.

Voice hoarse, he croaks to a passing nurse, “W-What do I put here?” A shaking finger points to a line on the paperwork. “What do I write about his mother if-if she’s dead?”

The nurse offers a sympathetic smile. He only half-listens to her instructions. He feels the vertiginous lurch of his world flipping upside down. Everyone says it stops feeling like that for after a while. But long after he adjusts, John still looks to the sky and sees the grass instead. He knows his world should center around his son and how grounding that should be, but selfishly, he clings to the clouds around his ankles because it doesn’t feel right to move forward when Claudia is stubbornly stuck behind.

 

_I live here on my knees_

_As I try to make you see_

_That you're everything I think I need_

_Here on the ground._

_But you're neither friend nor foe_

_Though I can't seem to let you go._

_The one thing that I still know is that you're keeping me down._

John promised her, again and again and again, that he wouldn’t let her death stop his life. He promised because that’s what husbands were supposed to do for their wives, promised because what else could you say to a dying woman? Promised because, for a while, he thought he could do it. He can see now how stupidly naive he had been: how could his life continue when his world revolved around her?

The sun rose and set with Claudia Stilinski, and after she was gone, he had been plunged in a terrifying, lonely darkness.

He sits at their empty kitchen table, the one they bought at a garage sale because it had “character”, and he pours amber liquid into a crystal glass. A wedding gift from her Aunt Susan. Even the burn of whiskey reminded him of her, the way her nose scrunched when she first tried his drink at a fraternity party at their small liberal arts college.

When he stands to put the glass in the sink, he stumbles, knocks the empty bottle onto the floor with a crash and shatter of scattered glass. He hears her in the twinkling of the shards settling to the ground. Tastes her in the tears gathered at the corners of his lips.    

Feels her hand pressed tight against his throat.

“Let me go,” he begs her with a gut-wrenching sob. He lurches to the sink, braces himself against the basin, empties the contents of his stomach and pants, hard and desperate. “I need to let you go _please_.”

 

_Set me free,_

_Leave me be._

_I don't wanna fall another moment_

_Into your gravity_

_Here I am and I stand so tall,_

_Just the way I'm supposed to be._

   

When Stiles smiles, he sees Claudia, and now he can finally smile back.

She still clings to his peripherals, is there is the hammer of his heart. And that is okay. Claudia Stilinski is hard to forget, but John doesn’t have to forget. He doesn’t want to.

She doesn’t sit on his shoulders like a weight anymore but like a guardian angel. He feels her breath against his neck, a kiss on his temple. John is not smothered by her absence nor her presence anymore. But he’s human, and sometimes he feels suffocated by how much he can miss her. But he knows enough to let grief crash and land and settle. He knows enough now to know how to take steps forward once the tide has rolled back.

She is in every moment of his every day, by choice and not by haunting.

Claudia would be proud.


End file.
